Odious Comparisons…Across & Beyond the Early Global World

Organized by Basil Arnould Price (John W. Baldwin Postdoctoral Fellow, CMRS-CEGS, UCLA) and Nancy Alicia Martínez (Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature, UCLA)

In his 1996 essay “Why Comparisons Are Odious,” W.J.T. Mitchell observed that if “difference and identity are the potent and inevitable terms in a new comparativism grounded in culture, it may be important to remind ourselves how insidious comparison can be, how invidious and odious.” Although written in response to the emergence of comparative cultural studies, Mitchell’s essay points to both the risks of comparison as well as how the oft-acknowledged ‘odiousness of comparison’ delimits the critical horizons of comparative and early global studies. In the past few decades, comparativists have interrogated the historical and ideological frameworks that structure the criterion by which we compare and what we hope the comparative will do, politically and intellectually – especially as our fields grapple with the historical entanglement of the comparative method in settler colonial, imperial, and racist histories. Clusters of articles in PMLA (Summer, 2013) and a decade later in Comparative Literature (Fall, 2023) examined the risks and limitations of comparative work, but also asked whether comparative methods could help to decolonize the academy by producing nonhierarchical dialogues between literatures, even those which were seen as incomparable. Similar conversations have emerged within early global studies, despite the historical dismissal of transtemporal, transcultural comparative work as lacking ‘rigor’ or as ‘anachronistic’, which has often resulted in the systematic exclusion of scholars who question the dominant epistemologies, methodologies, and politics of the field. However, recent work has illustrated the ways in which the early world confounds conventional periodization, unsettles national boundaries, and blurs disciplinary boundaries, necessitating interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives on the texts and contexts of the distant past. Although comparative work in premodern studies typically focuses on historically-verifiable instances of interconnection, translation, scholars such as Adam Miyashiro [Kānaka Maoli], Zrinka Stahuljak, and Rebecca de Souza have argued persuasively that asynchronous, disconnected, transcultural comparisons can provide methods for a truly global, decolonized medieval studies.

By seeking dialogue between the fields of comparative literature and early global studies, this two-day symposium, sponsored by the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) explores not just what makes comparison odious but also asks what is generative about odious comparisons.

In his influential Comparing the Incomparable (2008 [Comparer l’incomparable, 2002]), Marcel Detienne challenges the assumption that “only that which is comparable can be compared”, rejecting the assumption that the comparables only emerge from “neighboring societies, bordering one another, that have progressed, hand-in-hand, in the same direction, or […] at first glance present enough similarities for one to proceed safely” (23). Haun Saussy, responding to Detienne in Are We Comparing Yet? (2019), observes that even if “comparison becomes questionable” when it is not “a matter of common sense”, “the tacit criterion of “comparability” […] is designed to prevent the kinds of discovery that emerge from remote comparisons” (44). By drawing out what Wai-Chee Dimock calls ‘resonances’ – the ways in which a text signifies across time, its surprising echoes in strange contexts – how can we challenge comparisons premised on causation or chronology? In experimenting with comparative approaches to the early global past which are unshackled from the necessity of linearity, continuity, or connectivity, this symposium asks whether we can compare apples and oranges, and how such comparisons might generate new, destabilizing ways of knowing.